Category Archives: pessimism

Yesterday I posted a long, sappy golly-yabber about things I had to tell you before I die. I had experienced chest pains in the night and was rather planning on dropping dead somewhere during the day yesterday.

But it didn’t happen. It was the same arthritis pain in the left side of my rib-cage that sent me to the cardiologist twice before. So this time I got by planning to be dead today, and then, happily, it turned out that this morning I am still here. See, pessimism works! You only get pleasant surprises that way.

But I really do believe that it is the trouble we have in life that makes life worth living. I have value as a human being because I can use my creativity, determination, and relatively unstable mental condition to take on any problem. And if I should happen to be defeated, like I was in my quest to save the swimming pool, then my barely sane and somewhat loopy work ethic simply moves me on to the next crappy Mickey trap to figure out how to get the cheese out of it without getting killed.

So I ain’t dead. In fact, I am still following my own personal yellow brick road. And while tomorrow is not guaranteed, I can still sing and dance like Ray Bolger and Judy Garland as I am off to see the wizard. And no, I don’t think I’m Judy Garland in that metaphor. At least… not most of the time.

The city still thinks the pool needs to go. They don’t trust my do-it-yourself pool repair to hold water. But I have a lot of practice over the years drilling out, filling in, and repairing cracks. This was supposed to be the second time I brought the pool back to life with my own two hands and loads of internet instructional videos via YouTube. My work is not pretty. I didn’t have time to paint the pool before inspection. My lines of repair material are crooked and uneven, but to be fair, that’s because the cracks were also crooked and uneven. The true measure is whether or not my work holds water.

Here is the pool this morning, virtually the same water level, minus a bit of hot-day evaporation, as yesterday.

It looks like I fixed it, right? The city even grudgingly acknowledged that if I got the pump running quickly and replaced the underground pipes that were cracked, then I had the problem solved. But therein lies the rub, Rube. In order to install a new pump which was well within my budget and get the plumbing fixed, I had to have electricity to the pump circuits. The pool guy recommended calling an electrician. Which I did. Oh, man, what a bloodbath of expenses that was! $500 worth of exploring the attic and checking the lines in the house determined that not only did the electrician who installed the pool cheat and not install the electrical lines up to code, but the entire house, when it was built the 60’s or 70’s was wired improperly and has no main cut-off switch. To repair the electricity would cost around a thousand dollars more than having the pool removed, which I already cannot afford.

This is the pool looking as good as it is ever going to look again.

So, in spite of working like an enraged bull in the bull ring, goaded on by the matador who is the city inspector, for an entire week in July heat and unpredictable rain storms, and getting my part of the work done successfully, I am defeated.

My wife, the reigning Queen of Stubborn in our household, hasn’t given up yet. She has cousins in San Antonio who do electrical work. And she is determined to carry on with saving the pool. But I am defeated myself. It is time for a bit of depression again and more reliance on humor to get me through the dark nights ahead. (Notice, I said dark nights, not dark knights. I don’t have to fight Batman about this.)

The T. S. Eliot poem “The Hollow Men” talks about the disappointing nature of human beings and ends with a dire four lines quoted more often than any poem’s end in the history of poetry.

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

Now I have revealed this particular truth more than once. I am not prescient. I am an idiot. And the only things I know for certain about the future are that I will die one day, and so will everyone else. But knowing those things is wisdom. Especially the idiot part.

And I can see how things are progressing. I know what people are like at their core. If humanity is doomed to die out in the next century, or even the next decade, it will not be because of nuclear war. It will be something sneakier, quieter, and more permanently lethal.

It will be the fact that people are capable of heartlessness and cruelty. Adolf Hitler turned the full power of government-focused hatred on those he defined as less than human; Jews, gypsies, gay people, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and the mentally handicapped. He used that focus to burn those peoples out of existence. But many forces in the human character rose up to shield the victims, saving some and avenging the others. Hitler learned the hard way that he was not the end of the world… from a bullet, in a bunker, having lost an empire.

Now, the Republican clown show in the United States is turning into Killer Klowns from Outer Space.

They show lack of concern for anything but corporate profits. They will undo Medicare and cancel the Meals on Wheels program because, according to evil leprechauns in charge of the budget, we can’t afford to feed people, or educate people, or do anything to dry up the painful ocean of poverty capitalism is creating. No, we must bury our pots of gold and any magic they have left in them.

They have changed the laws on environmental protections to allow themselves to profit by pouring pollutants into rivers and water supplies. They pull out of world-wide agreements to work towards saving the environment from climate change.

They may have found a way to focus hatred through the lens of indifference. Hitler’s mistake was in thinking most humans could be manipulated only through fear and hatred for those who were different. Trump’s troll army has added stupidity and greed to the lenses the light can be filtered through. And so, they may well succeed where Nazis failed.

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

So the head monkey has fired the giraffe in charge of looking into the Russian banana pilfering that has everyone questioning his fitness to rule. Rule? Heck! I question his continued right to own bananas!

But this post is supposed to be a reflection on surviving, not another angry animal metaphor about things that can’t be cured until the next election, or until the elephants that put the monkey in charge do something about their own addiction to bananas and work up the necessary human emotion and moral outrage to remove him as head of the zoo.

Steve Bannon, the idea-monkey of the Monkey Kingdom

So let me enumerate some of the thoughts that give me peace in the midst of this insane monkey-house cacophony. (Cacophony is a good word to use around the topic of the monkey king because it has both the words “caca” and “phony” in it.)

Bannon is a very scary chimpanzee, but he is apparently on the outs in the court of the monkey king. He got in a verbal kerfuffle with Orangutan Junior Kushner, and the monkey king has not recently crayoned his signature on the poison-in-executive-order-form that Bannon cares most about.

Orangutan Junior Kushner is now in charge of everything under the sun. All bananas now grow by his doings, and he can’t possibly run everywhere and poo everywhere to properly fertilize all the banana trees. And considering the toxic qualities of the monkey king’s banana trees, we probably don’t really want them to grow anyway.

Orangutan Junior Kushner has taken to wearing Trump-style hair.

The Russian banana pilfering has put all other monkey initiatives on hold. The monkey king was planning to create monkey laws with the elephants that would prevent most other animals from having any hope of health care. It made its way successfully through the Elephant House and was supposed to move on to the Elephant Senate to be officially stamped with the notion that providing the other animals with mythical “access” to health care wasn’t just a way to make animals pay all their money to insurance piranhas and still not be able to afford any real health care. Now they are forced instead to talk about other banana-related things.

And on the subject of bananas, the monkeys and the elephants actually have them all already. So we don’t have to worry about having bananas. We probably never will. All they have left for us are the peanuts. But they like to take and eat our peanuts too. The good part of this is that peanuts are a healthy food for diabetics. And, of course, you can’t die of over-eating if you cannot buy food.

The Orange King is very, very HYUGE! but his hands are small.

So, the long and the short of it is this. It is not hard to see the end of this struggle to survive the monkey king’s rule. I, for one, will probably not survive. But cutting the legs out from under the giraffe investigating the Russian banana pilfering was probably the beginning of the end of the monkey king himself. The lions, wherever they have been hiding, will now come out and eat him.

Yes, this is another pitiful attempt by Mickey to be a political cartoonist fighting the good fight by slaying the bad guys with really weak and awful satire. But I can’t help it. Just as Popeye had a powerful urge to sock goons in the puss with his spinach-fueled twister-sock, I have to throw some derfy toonage at the vile and heartless members of the GOP (Greedy Old Perpetrators).

After all, they are easy to make fun of. Republican job applications all start with the question, “Which cartoon Dick Tracy villain or comic book Batman villain are you most like?”

They do things like organizing an Oversight Committee for the sole purpose of spending millions of dollars to point fingers at Hillary and shout the name of a North-African town where diplomats died basically because of budget cuts to security ( a Republican budget) and shout it loudly until people begin to think Hillary must have had something to do with it because men with heads shaped like sports equipment are shouting it so much.

And Republicans are able to do this stuff because they know how to win elections and control the government.

Basically what I am saying is that Republicans cheat. They get to rule even though they generate fewer votes in the country.

And what do they do with that power once they have it in their tiny, tiny hands? They use it to make more money. The rise of the billionaire class in the last thirty years is evidence that they are insanely good at it. Do they use that money and power to help their neighbors and better the lives of everyone? Of course not! Why would you think that?

Republican priorities are obvious when you look at the first things on their agenda. They want to roll back environmental protections and pour more pollutants into rivers and into the air. They want to do away with Obamacare to eliminate the extra taxes that wealthy people have to pay. They want to prevent people from immigrating from lands where people don’t have white skin, because the only part of a Republican that can be black with the full approval of their party, is the heart. Yes, that part can be jet black and rancid.

I had promised myself to put the whole political outrage stew in the freezer for a while, and stop picking at the meat and potatoes of it before it completely poisons me. But President Pumpkinhead is imploding so fast I may miss out before incoming Russian and North Korean and even possibly Australian missiles begin nuking the greater Dallas-Fort Worth area. I guess I simply have to boil it a little bit more right now.

If I were going to script it as a psycho-consensual farce and put it on the stage, I couldn’t have written it any funnier. It seems a couple of evil geniuses have been manipulating the pumpkin-headed guy so they could achieve their own personal ends. They are selling him invisible clothing again. And they will get away with it, too, because they are doing it in the context of the Republican Party. The GOP, of course, is the party that cheats in order to win. They gerrymander voting districts. They suppress voters that are more likely to vote for Democrats. And they maintain a lock-grip on the House where more people nationwide actually voted for Democrats, but that comes through the voting system as a Republican majority victory. They are, as Sylvester says so juicily, DESPICABLE!!! (Yes, I know, the triple exclamation point thing again.)

Tweedle-not-so-dumb and his twin brother, Tweedle-evil.

It appears that now that Hatchet-face Flynn, the Dick-Tracy villain who was in charge of National Security, committed treason by promising the Russians that Obama’s sanctions for hacking the American election would be overturned as soon as Trump took over the job as big cheese in chief. And it not only appears that Trump knew about this (or is that gnu about this?), but even said after Flynn was fired that he would’ve approved of it if he had known… even though he didn’t know… (or gnu).

Immediately thereafter, Football-head and Bowling-ball-head on the Congressional Oversight Committee (You know, Trey Gowdy and Jason Chaffetz who brought you the Endless Benghazi Hearings Follies and Republican Musical Review) went about the business of completely overlooking any possible wrong doing by the Pumpkinhead Administration.

A Republican friend of mine once told me that he knew that all the crooks weren’t exclusively in the Democratic Party, but that’s the only place he really wanted to look for them. It helped him sleep better at night.

I spent a good share of last evening being lectured over Facebook by a conservative friend about not getting behind the Trumpkin bandwagon and scooping up the horse poop so they could continue their parade of doing Republican good things for the country (where “Republican good things” is a phrase that means destroying public education, taking away my healthcare since I have six pre-existing conditions, and dumping coal pollutants into rivers and oil pollutants into the air). Apparently my writing stuff about Pumpkinhead Tinyhands that isn’t positive is a protest which constitutes terrorism, and I need to go to some other country like Canada where the commie-ISIS dictator is a libtard idiot just like me. I don’t have a right to stay here if I protest the elected government and the so-called humor in my blog and Facebook posts are unacceptably un-patriotic. Apparently you can only call black presidents Hitler without being hooted out of the country by REAL AMERICANS.

Apparently I am wrong about this man. I am told he does not have a bowling ball for a head.

Yes, I am well aware that I am in the middle of an epic Shakespeare rant this week, explaining in the goofiest of terms the reason I believe Shakespeare is not Shaksper. But you have to mark a solemn occasion like the onset of the end-times. So I thought I might pay dissembling dreary lip service to the inauguration of a man who, if he appeared in the middle of a Dick Tracy episode, would be known as the villainous Cheeto-head.

You see, I don’t recognize this villain as the legitimate head of my government. So I won’t be using the title of “President” with this villain’s name. Instead, I intend to practice Shakespearian insults to get the bad taste out of my mouth on this horrible day resulting from the malfeasance of certain bad actors, a concerted effort to suppress the vote in key States like Florida, an inebriated campaign run by a dissolute, dissembling mountebank with a talent for misdirection, and a very unfortunate ill-timed collective brain fart on the part of masses of angry but somewhat intellectually limited white people. (No, I am not worried that they will get me for that last one. They don’t know what most of the words mean, and none of them would take the time to read this far through this post.)

The conflagration of Trumpkin Trolls on the internet have been telling me that they have endured eight years of Obama, and now I should just shut up and endure eight years of the Great Orange Face. But, swaggering lackwits, I say thee nay! This will not be an eight year reign. It will either be a zero-year tragedy extravaganza or a permanent reign until the bedeviled Fenris Wolf consumes poor over-wrought Thor on the terrible day know as Ragnarok. The spoiled bag of figgy pudding that is our new leader and golden king will have a lot to answer to St. Peter for. Um, or is that Mephistopheles?

I intend to hold the vicarious viscount of villainy accountable with my words and wit, meager as they may be. And I will decry everything he and the harpy DeVos will do to my beloved system of public education. I will probably also expire from the villainy of the wretched Republican pizzle drinkers who are busy disemboweling the health care system that has so recently kept me alive, but I will continue to testify to their perfidy until my last breath expires.

So, I guess I can bring an end to this venomous epistle satisfied that I have lectured ass-headed Bottom about having a donkey’s head on his shoulders in the most roundly Shakespearean way I could wrangle. Shakespeare, if he gave us anything of value, gave us to understand the true power of words. And it is by the application of powerful and true words we must battle this sanguine, self-satisfied snollygoster who can barely read and is crippled with a dysfunctional slow-working pate which he more often sits on than uses to think with.